I taught two courses as a graduate student: Global Modernism and Its Successors: An Introduction and Children’s Literature. Both were full of useful screw-ups, but let’s focus on the louder failure. Global Modernism and Its Successors, a course not of my choosing or design, was assigned to all aspiring English PhDs at my university. That […]
Back in the days when Pluto was a planet and skinny jeans were not yet a diabolical spark in some sadist’s eye, I was a literature major at American University, and I had a great advisor. I remember visiting his office hours a lot, toting along a tear-stained draft of some paper I had absolutely no […]
My mom died unexpectedly in 2006, when I was in graduate school. I’d just finished up my second year as a PhD student at Rice, and I’d submitted my seminar papers: one on Rochester and syphilis and another on deferral and serialization in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. I was a TA for a section of […]
Why hello there! It’s been awhile. I could list the many reasons I haven’t been blogging, but (a) I am a staunch opponent of busy porn, and (b) we all know I had plenty of time to watch all of Season 1 of Queer Eye AND to consider the many think-pieces about whether or not Antoni […]
My ten-year high school reunion was in 2009. I traveled back to Charlotte, North Carolina eager to see my close friends, harboring only a few secret desires that the demigods of high school vengeance had punished those who deserved a comeuppance. But I was anxious about the possibility of being plummeted, immediately and this time […]
The first book I ever taught to undergraduates was Jamaica Kincaid’s An Autobiography of My Mother. I was a TA in Terry Doody’s Twentieth-Century British Literature course at Rice University. That morning I had downed what was just a ridiculous amount of grape juice. I still don’t know why I did that. It did not end […]
I don’t remember precisely what we were talking about, but I do remember that I was in a seminar on eighteenth-century British literature during my first year of graduate school. This was the same seminar in which I called this gentleman ben-juh-min rather than ben-yah-meen, because of course I did. I mean, Walter Benjamin had been […]
It took me two tries to get into graduate school. Year One was a wash, ending in an offer with no money to an institution in a city I couldn’t afford to live in — and an admit to the MA program, not the PhD program to which I’d applied. Year Two involved an awkward […]
Failing Loudly 